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Another set of statistics from the Office for National Statistics on the number of zero hours contracts has prompted the usual public debate as zero hours contracts continue in their role as symbol of everything that has gone wrong in the UK labour market.

The TUC has released an instructive analysis of low pay by locality, based on data from the House of Commons Library. The findings suggest that in some areas more than half of all employees are being paid less than the Living Wage.

Mental Health First Aid England (MHFA) is a Community Interest Company (CIC) which means it is asset locked and it reinvests its profits back in to the company’s social objective - to increase the mental health literacy of England's population.

One of the major research themes at The Work Foundation in recent years has focused on the issue of youth employment. Three years ago, the numbers of young people (aged under 25) who were unemployed exceeded a million. This was profoundly harmful to the young people directly affected, of course, and moreover it represented a huge wasted resource for the country as a whole.

‘If I had money to invest in one thing, it would be line manager training.’ declared Dame Carol Black at the recent HR Directors summit. The previous week Professor Cary Cooper speaking at the “Why Mental Health Matters” Conference described poor line management as the biggest issue that HR Directors face in the UK.

The latest release of underemployment data in the Bell-Blanchflower series has highlighted sharp differentials by age and by ethnicity in workers’ experience in the labour market. These differentials are explored further in the table below, which draws on pooled data from the most recent available four quarters of the Labour Force Survey.

When discussing the management of long-term conditions in the workplace, employers can come in for a rough time, with the perception that they are not doing enough to help employees with long-term conditions at work.

I have to confess that until last December when I joined a roundtable hosted by The Work Foundation’s Health at Work Policy Unit, I didn’t know what ‘fluctuating health conditions’ were, much less that I have at least one such condition and, within the small business I run, we have more than 10 years’ experience of helping individuals manage such conditions.

It is estimated that by 2030, four out of ten working age people will have at least one chronic health condition, and some will have several. In many of them the symptoms will fluctuate, often unpredictably. This can present a challenge both to them and to their employers.

Despite a number of advances in the way we are helping those with chronic and fluctuating conditions to stay in work, such as reforms to access to work, the introduction of the right to request flexible working and DWP’s latest initiative, Fit for Work , we have to ask ourselves – are we really doing enough to help those most at risk of falling out of the labour market to stay in work?

A recent paper published by Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) at Oxford University suggests that the UK has had an hour-glass labour market, with growth at the top and bottom of the labour market...

It has long been acknowledged that mental illness can have a devastating effect on individuals, families and communities across Europe. In recent years its impact on wider society, on productivity and economic growth have also been more widely recognised. Indeed, the challenges of deteriorating mental health in European countries where the financial crisis and high unemployment have hit hardest are still presenting challenges to policy-makers and healthcare professionals.

An estimated 300,000 people suffer from Inflammatory Bowel Disease ( IBD) in the UK. IBD is a fluctuating, chronic, long-term condition where individuals may experience symptoms such as stomach cramps, blood in stools, and an urgency of needing the toilet. The diagnosis of IBD can occur at any time, but IBD is common in an individual’s teens or early twenties, a crucial time when they are moving from education to employment thus having an impact on an individual’s career decisions.

At the start of a new year, we are all tempted to ask the question: what will the next 12 months bring? So let me try and answer this from the point of view of a commentator on the labour market in the UK. It’s an easy question to answer in a single word – uncertainty.